'Matrix Online' a new virtual reality

A brief reintroduction for those still scratching their heads after "The Matrix Revolutions": When we last saw Neo, aka The One, he made a truce with the evil machines and saved the last bastion of humanity in the underground city of Zion.

A revised Matrix was formed after the renegade, replicating Agent Smith was defeated, and we saw the machines carting off Neo's corpse to points unknown. Did he die? And what about all those people still unwittingly serving as batteries for the machines?

That's just part of the murky mystery in "The Matrix Online," where players can choose to ally with the Machines, the Exiles or residents of Zion for control of the new system.

"Nobody is sure how long this truce will last. The theme for the first year is peace and the things people will do to screw it up," said writer Paul Chadwick, who was chosen by "Matrix" creators Larry and Andy Wachowski to keep the game's story moving forward.

There are "red pills," humans who can freely enter the Matrix with some limits, while the remaining "blue pills" still have no idea they've been duped into living in a simulated world.

Writing the story for such a never-ending online game where hundreds can gather at once was among the biggest challenges, said Chadwick, creator of the Concrete comics in which a man's brain is transplanted into a hulking stone body by aliens.

"You can't really hold everybody's attention on the same spot at the same time, so you've got to spray story at them from four different directions," he said. "I think I finally got the hang of that. There will be story happening all over the place."

Many key characters from the films make a return, including Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Merovingian (Lambert Wilson).
The movies were a dystopian vision of the future, and that certainly continues in the video game version.

The kung fu combat and gravity-defying battles take place in the same steel-gray world of towering skyscrapers and urban grit called MegaCity.

It's not all dreariness, though - there are plenty of opportunities for aspiring fashion designers, says lead game designer Toby Ragaini.
Once you enter the Matrix, players can fully customize their characters, selecting gender, hair style, body shape, tattoos and clothing. Lots and lots of clothing.

Ragaini says "The Matrix Online" should appeal to "people who are never going to be interested in dwarfs and orcs. It's a contemporary urban fantasy."

Such online games are notorious time sinks, requiring hour after hour of secluded devotion to advance.

Ragaini says that's one of the things he tried to overcome.

"A lot of people just don't have two-, three-hour periods of time to devote to games," he said. "We decided it was important that players be able to complete a narrative experience in a half hour."
Chadwick isn't worried that the critical backlash over the last two films, "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions," would affect the game version.

"I have to speak up for the sequels. `Reloaded' is my favorite. I think they are going to go through a Stanley Kubrick cycle," he said. "I think the critical consensus will warm up to the trilogy as a whole in the next few years."

And what of the almighty Neo? Will we see him again?

"In the game, Morpheus finds himself without the great quest of his life. He wonders why the machines won't return Neo's body," Chadwick said. "A lot of people have different ideas. Maybe he's still alive? Rumors are a big part of our story."

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

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Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.